A Quick Chat with James Colton

Photo: Daniel Grant

Can you tell us a bit about your musical journey? When did you first discover your passion for music?

I was six years old when Dad showed me how to put a record on the turntable. It was a privilege my brother wasn’t yet trusted with. First you had to use an anti-static gun to help prevent dust from collecting on the record surface. Then you dabbed some vinyl cleaning fluid on to a record cleaning brush, Dad’s had a fancy wood trim surrounding the velvet pad. I was at least thirteen before I realised you could just throw a record on without doing any of that stuff and it still sounded good.

The record he first picked out for me was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, a very lucky choice considering he doesn’t play music and his favourite album at the time was actually Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell. From the moment the heartbeat fades in on the opening track my little mind was blown. I don’t know how many times I played that record, it was a lot. I have memories of scooting from speaker to speaker in front of the hi-fi, following all the crazy sound effects that pan from left to right on that album. I was a weird kid. I also had this toy piano organ and I spent ages working out how to play the chords to Great Gig in the Sky on it. My Nana, when visiting one day, overheard me figuring out songs and practically demanded that my parents get me piano lessons. I think she even helped buy the piano, which I still have. It now lives at Golding Sounds, the studio space I work from and am lucky enough to share with some other talented musicians & producers.

Your background includes everything from heavy rock bands to symphony orchestras and film scores. How did those diverse experiences shape you as a musician?

All those experiences have taught me there’s a lot of different ways to make music, and they’re all valid and have their own particular strengths and weaknesses. From sitting at a piano keyboard & computer figuring out meticulous arrangements to having a big sludgy noise jam in a rehearsal room, music is about invoking an emotional response. There’s no right or wrong way to go about it as long as it makes you feel something.

Who were some of your biggest musical influences growing up, and how have they impacted your sound today?

Being a high school kid of the nineties, it was a period of time where heavy guitars were hailed above all else by serious music lovers. My ability to play piano and saxophone only impressed my nerdiest friends. Like everyone else my age I also started loving bands like Pixies, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Radiohead and this eventually led to me picking up a guitar. Through that I discovered a love of big distorted tones and immediately started looking for ways to create those kinds of harmonically rich sounds with my keyboard playing. Around that time I also rediscovered The Roaring Silence by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, from Dad’s vinyl collection again. That record has some incredible keyboard tones achieved by running organs and keyboards through guitar pedals and amps. I think my signature sounds are mainly a collection of overdriven synths with wah-wah pedals that could sometimes be mistaken for fuzzy 1970s guitar tones.

If you could collaborate with any artist, past or present, who would it be and why?

David Bowie. I’ve always been inspired by his distinctive perspective on music, and his fearlessness at taking risks, creatively speaking. Would also love to discuss songwriting with Carole King, she has a gift for writing songs with an emotional punch. In the local scene I’m absolutely loving just about everything by the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, they seem like a super talented bunch.

What inspired the concept behind Emotional Vampire? Was there a defining moment that set the creative process in motion?

It’s an album loosely about technology and our relationship with it. Originally I was going to make the entire project using nothing but my laptop. I had some song ideas I’d turned into some pretty decent sounding demos spanning a number of genres all created with digital instruments, it wasn’t anything serious just a bit of fun. Then by chance a couple of good friends of mine were about to start renting this studio space in West Perth and were looking for another person to share the space and rent with. Now all of a sudden I had a studio full of gear and instruments to play with. It was a journey of discovery adding and replacing layers of the arrangements with live performances. I enjoyed hearing the songs evolve and transform from fully machine generated to live musicians so much that somewhere along the way I thought, why can’t I use this? So there’s a lot of tracks that start with completely digital instrumentation and evolve to use live drums, or even a full band, and every combination in between. I’ve always loved that feeling when you’re enjoying a solid drum machine groove but then the real drums kick in and take it up a notch. There’s a fair bit of that on this album, but also a lot more subtle interplay between real and virtual instruments, sometimes morphing a performance from one to the other and back again. It made sense for the themes around the songs to be technology related, which was a bit of a happy accident, and help tie some of the wildly different genres together into something more cohesive.

The album was written, arranged, performed, recorded, and mixed entirely by you at Golding Sounds Studios. What was it like taking full creative control of the project?

Not entirely mixed by me, a few mixes were greatly improved by Mitch McDonald, Ryan Brennan and Mark McEwan. There’s quite a few guest musicians as well, shout out again to Mitch McDonald, Ryan Brennan, and also Russell Loasby, Trevor Cotton, and Brody Simpson who are all talented legends. I’m a firm believer that the best music comes from bands, you need someone with creative vision and then people to push and pull against the main ideas to explore all the best possibilities. When working solo I try to get around this by taking breaks, vowing not to listen to the recordings for a month or so, and then coming back to them with fresh ears to generate a new round of ideas or improvements. One of the advantages of getting older is that you can actually completely forget something you’ve made when you come back to it haha.

The title track has been described as evolving from digital whispers to raw live instrumentation. Can you walk us through the creative process of building that track?

This was the first track where I deliberately set out to have a programmed drum machine suddenly be replaced by a real drummer to enhance the climax of the song. I also ended up doing the same with some virtual guitars becoming real ones etc, the evolution happens in stages, with the moody middle section changing a lot from the original concept as the layers of live instruments were added. It was an experiment. It turned out wildly overdramatic, in a fun Mr. Bungle kind of way.

What do you hope listeners take away from Emotional Vampire? Is there a particular feeling or message you want to resonate?

Under the shadow of big tech, AI, and a growing generation of doom scrolling nerds with social anxiety like myself, it’s never been easier to form some seriously bad mental health habits. The algorithms can suck the life out of you if you let them. But these new tools aren’t inherently bad, if anything they’re too good at what they were designed to do, which is to keep you entertained. The challenge—and maybe the message behind Emotional Vampire—is to recognise when technology is feeding your creativity and when it’s just draining your energy. I want listeners to come away from the album questioning their own relationship with tech: are you using it as a tool for expression, connection, and learning, and are you conscious of the subtle ways it can influence your moods, thoughts, and creativity?

James Colton’s debut album Emotional Vampire is out now via Blue Grey Pink.
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